Benefits for the detection of difficult targets have been demonstrated for multispectral and polarimetric imagery in differing conditions. The spectral differences between target and background have been seen to provide an enhancement to target discrimination. However, false alarms can occur mainly due to spectral variations in background materials. Complimentarily, polarimetric imagery has been used to detect man made targets by exploiting the reflective characteristics of man-made objects and the suppression of background clutter; but the detection process can be limited by the geometry and nature of targets. A data gathering SWIR Multispectral-Polarimetric sensor has been built to investigate whether adding polarimetric to multispectral information decreases background induced false alarms whilst maintaining good detection statistics for low contrast targets.
There is strong evidence to suggest that polarimetric techniques offer significant improvements in the ability of electro-optic sensors to detect difficult targets in cluttered backgrounds. Many previous attempts to quantify the potential benefits have been hampered by an inability to gather all the polarimetric data simultaneously from a scene. Sequential data gathering can lead to artefacts in the polarimetric data which in turn lead to spurious and erroneous conclusions being drawn This paper describes work undertaken to build and test a pair of four camera, real time, polarimetric sensors that measure all four Stokes parameters simultaneously. One of the sensors operates in the visible waveband and the other in the near infrared. Example images obtained with both sensors are shown, together with measured target and background signal distributions for one of them. Preliminary results from this work show that the sensor can significantly improve target discrimination.
This paper describes a simple new optical technique for enhancing underwater target detection. Small-scale laboratory experiments using an idealised turbid medium consisting of polystyrene particles in water showed that detection ranges were up to an order of magnitude greater than those achieved using conventional methods. This work was carried out as part of the Electronic Systems Domain of the MOD Research programme.
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